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1947 Indian Independence
You are asking: You were in India at the time that India gained
her independence from Britain. What kind of an affect did that
have on you after living under the British rule, and then not
to have them anymore. It must have been rather traumatic for most
Indians.
I am a little eccentric. I was more pro-British than pro-Indian....
Because everything that has happened in India - technology, science,
education, colleges, universities, railway lines, roads, cars,
airplanes - everything has happened because of the British rule.
If there had been no British rule, India would have been the same
as Ethiopia.
Before the British rule, for thousands of years they were burning
women alive if their husbands died. Husbands were never burned
when their wives died. I don't see.... It is a simple arithmetic:
this is a male chauvinist society. The husband is trying to control
even after his death. The wife was forced in such a ugly way that
if you visualize the whole scene you would not believe it. And
these are the Hindus who talk about great spirituality....
And this was all religious ritual. For thousands of years they
have been doing that. The whole credit goes to the British empire,
that they prevented it; they made it criminal. It was criminal.
For thousands of years India has been poor. It is said in Hindu
scriptures that people never used locks on their houses. Even
if they were going for few months' pilgrimage they would not use
locks, because there was no fear of anybody stealing. This is
absolutely wrong. My understanding is that first they had nothing
to be stolen; second, locks were not yet invented.
Indians are so lousy - they will not try to do anything. They
would rather starve, but they will not make any effort to become
rich. The country is tremendously capable of becoming rich, but
the people's minds are not able to use the opportunity.
Before Britain came into India's history, these poor people
were giving birth to ten children. Only one would survive and
nine would die. There was no medicine, no medical care. Now, because
of Britain, it is just the opposite: out of ten children only
one dies, nine live. And that one also dies because of Indian
stupidity...because Mahatma Gandhi was against vaccination, he
was against allopathy; he was against everything that has been
invented after the spinning wheel. And nobody knows when the spinning
wheel was invented - perhaps ten thousand years before. After
that, everything is evil. It seems God made the spinning wheel
on the sixth day, and after that.... Anything: railway trains,
telegraph, post offices, telephones, radios, televisions - Gandhi
was against all these things; he would not agree to them. last203
In my childhood I have seen it in my village: people who smoked
used to carry two stones, the white stones which are available
on the shore of any river. They would put a little cotton between
those two stones and rub the cotton between them; that rubbing
would create fire, the cotton would burn up. That was perhaps
the most primitive lighter. Perhaps they are still doing it. I
have not been to my village for many years - they must still be
doing it. Who will bother about a modern lighter? - you need petrol
and you need this and you need that. Those poor people can just
get two stones from anywhere, and carry those stones with them.
It is the simplest and cheapest way, and they can create fire
anywhere. person13
Karl Marx was not wrong when he said that religions have functioned
as the opium of the people. I am not a Marxist but this statement
I cannot deny, he is absolutely right. Religions have proved to
be opium. In Indian villages where women go to work in the fields,
or somewhere where a road is being made, or a bridge is being
made, and the women working have small children.... One day I
was just walking by the side of the river, a bridge was being
built and there was a small child under a tree, so happy, so joyous,
so ecstatic. I could not believe...what could be the cause of
it? So I waited by the side of the tree. His mother was working
on the bridge, and she came back to give some milk to the child.
I said to her, "You have a really great child. I have never
come across such a psychedelic child in my whole life."
She said, "It is nothing. We poor people, what can we do?
We cannot afford somebody to take care of the child, so we give
the child some opium. Whether he is hungry or thirsty, whether
it is hot or cold, it does not matter. In his opium, he is enjoying
paradise." exist06
I know poor people, utterly poor, who have nothing; it is so
difficult for them to even manage one meal a day. Sometimes they
have to just drink water and sleep - water to fill their empty
belly so they can feel that something is there. But they are in
a certain way satisfied, they have accepted it as their fate,
they don't think that things can be better than this. You can
provoke them. You can put the fire in their minds very easily - just
give them hope. But then sooner or later they are going to hold
you by your neck: "Where are the hopes?" unconc04
The misery is not really only materialistic. I have seen the
poorest people happy. They don't have anything, but they have
not based their life philosophy on wrong ideas. It is more a question
of what kind of spirituality you have accepted. Is it something
beyond death? Is your spirituality not of this world but of some
other world? sword01
Before India became independent there was such a feeling all
over India. My house was a place of conspiracy. My two uncles
had been in jail many times, and every week they had to go to
the police station to report that they were not doing anything
against the government, and that they were still there. They were
not allowed to move out of the town but people were coming to
them - and they all had so much hope.
I was a small child but I always wondered, "These people
are saying that just by becoming independent, all misery will
disappear. How can it happen? I don't see any connection."
But there was hope. There was the promised land, very close by;
just a little struggle and you would reach it. There was suffering
but you were not responsible for it: the Britishers were responsible.
It was a great consolation to dump everything on the Britishers.
In fact, I used to ask these revolutionaries who used to visit
my house secretly, or sometimes stay in my house for months....
One of them, a very famous revolutionary, Bhavani Prasad Tiwari,
was the national leader of the socialist party. Whenever he had
to go underground he used to come to my village and just live
in my house, hidden. For the whole day he would not come out -
and nobody knew him in the village anyway. But I was after him.
He told me again and again, "You bring such inconvenient
questions that sometimes I think it would be better to be in a
British jail than in your house! At least there I would get first
class treatment."
He was a famous leader so he would have got first class treatment
- political prisoners' special class - with all the facilities,
good food, good library. And at least he would get freedom, because
first class prisoners were not forced to do any labor. They would
write their autobiographies and other books: all the great books
these great Indian leaders have written were written in jails.
And they would go for walks - they were put in beautiful places
that were not even jails; they were created especially for them.
For example in Poona there was a palace just on the other side
of the river: the Aga Khan palace. It was a palace. Gandhi was
kept prisoner there and his wife too. His wife died there, her
grave is still there in the Aga Khan's palace. In Poona - when
you pass the bridge, just on top of the hill above there is a
beautiful house....
So these special palaces were turned into prisons. They had
acres of greenery, beautiful views. So Bhavani Prasad Tiwari used
to say to me, "It would be better if I stop going underground
- because you ask inconvenient questions."
I said, "If you cannot answer them, what is going to happen
to the country when the country becomes independent? These will
be the questions which you will have to solve. You cannot even
answer them verbally, and then you will have to actually solve
them. I asked him, "Just by the Britishers leaving the country"
- and there were not many Britishers - how is poverty going to
disappear? And do you want me to believe that before the Britishers
came to India, India was not poor?
"It was as poor as it is now, perhaps even poorer, because
the Britishers brought industry, technology, and that helped the
country to become a little better. They brought education, schools,
colleges, universities. Before that, there was no way to be educated:
the only educated people were the brahmins, because the father
would teach the son. They kept everybody else uneducated because
that was the best way to keep them enslaved. Education can become
dangerous.
"How are you going to destroy poverty? How are you going
to destroy the hundreds of kinds of anxieties and miseries which
have nothing to do with the British? Now, a husband is suffering
because of his wife - how is it going to help? The Britishers
have gone, okay; but the wife will still be there, the husband
will still be there - how is it going to change anything?"
He said, "I know it is very difficult, but let us first
get independence."
I said, "I know after independence the problems will be the
same, perhaps worse."
They are worse. ignor01
India became independent in 1947. I was very young, but I had
kept my eyes clear and uncontaminated by the older generation.
From my very childhood I have insisted on having my own insight,
my own intelligence, and I don't want to borrow any knowledge
from anybody.
My whole family was involved in the struggle for the freedom
of the country. Everybody had been in jail. Although I was never
in jail because of the liberation movement, I suffered as much
as one can suffer, because all the earning males were forced into
jails and the family was left without any source of earning.
I asked my father, "Are you aware that once you are liberated
from the British empire...and it is going to happen, because now
Britain is burdened. They have exploited the land to the maximum;
now the situation has reversed - they have to help the country
to survive. It is better for them to escape from here and get
rid of a burden which has become absolutely unnecessary."
They were not here to serve the people, they were here to exploit.
And that's exactly what happened.
The revolution happened in 1942 without any effect. It was quashed
completely within nine days, and with those nine days all hope
of freedom disappeared. But suddenly, out of the blue, Britain
decided in 1947 to make the country free.
I told my father, "Don't think that your freedom movement
has succeeded. Between the freedom movement and the actual coming
of freedom there is a five-year gap. This is not logical. You
are being given freedom because now you have become a burden and
a trouble, just your existence."
And I have come to know that researchers, looking into the whole
history of the British Parliament and their decisions, found out
that the British Prime Minister Attlee sent Mountbatten with the
message: "Do it as quickly as possible." He had given
him a set time, that, "by 1948 we should get rid of this
burden."
Mountbatten proved even more efficient. He managed it one year
earlier. But I told my father, "You have been fighting, not
knowing that once this country is free it will start having new
fights, within itself."
Now Mohammedans have taken Pakistan - it was part and parcel of
the freedom, because Mohammedans refused to live with the Hindus.
They had lived together for almost fourteen hundred years and
there was no problem. In my childhood I have participated in Mohammedan
celebrations; Mohammedans were participating in Hindu marriages,
Hindu celebrations. There was no question of fight, because everybody
was fighting the British empire. Once the British empire was leaving,
suddenly the Mohammedans and Hindus became alert - a new division.
They declared that they could not live together because their
religions are different. Mohammedans became adamant: "Either
the British empire remains...we can risk freedom, but we cannot
live with Hindus in an independent country because they are in
the majority. They will rule, and Mohammedans don't have any chance
of ruling." mani20
My feeling is that Britain has done two things wrong: in the
first place, it imposed slavery on the country; in the second
place, like cowards it escaped from its responsibility. Britain
should have remained there till they had educated people not to
be violent, not to be superstitious, not to be against each other
- Hindus against Mohammedans, Mohammedans against Buddhists, Buddhists
against Jainas. There are so many sects and subsects, and everybody
is against everybody else. And that the country is spiritual,
and nonviolence is its ideology - this is all nonsense. This is
just hypocrisy.
Britain has done a very lousy job. I was certainly angry with
Lord Mountbatten. He was the wrong person to send to India to
make India free. He had no experience of politics. In fact, he
was just a playboy his whole life. Just to keep him away from
England - because he belonged to the royalty, and if a person
belonging to the royalty is a playboy, then everybody's wife is
in danger, everybody is in danger - so they kept continuously
sending him out of England. But you cannot send him out just like
that - he was royalty, he could have been the king; it was just
by chance that he was not the eldest son.
First they sent him to Burma. When he came back from Burma, immediately
he was told, "Pack your luggage and go to India. You have
a great job to do: make India independent."
Just think, the sheer immensity of the work! When you make a
country a slave for hundreds of years you have to fight, and within
a day you can make it independent. I don't see the logic. Even
when I was only seventeen, I could not see the logic of it. I
wrote a letter to Lord Mountbatten that this is not the right
time for this country to be independent. If everything is peaceful,
it is simply cold war. Once the pressure of British control is
gone, then.... last203
Just close to my town, beyond the river, was a small state, Bhopal.
The king was Mohammedan, the population was Hindu, so everywhere
there were riots because the population wanted the state to merge
with India, and the king wanted to merge it with Pakistan because
he was Mohammedan. But it was in the middle of India so it was
not easy to merge with Pakistan. There was a great fight between
the king's forces and the population, and we were just on the
other side of the river. We could see from this side people being
killed on the other side.
We caught four dead people who were killed by the forces of
the king; somehow they must have fallen in the river, and they
came to our side so we caught hold of them. Naturally, I had to
persuade people, "This is not good. They have been fighting
for the freedom of the country; they wanted the country to merge
into India - you should not leave them like that."
They wanted to throw them into the river and be finished: who
could be bothered with them? But somehow I gathered a few young
people, and then a few old people felt ashamed and they came.
But first, before we could do anything they had to be postmortemed,
so we took them to the hospital. The postmortem place was almost
two furlongs away behind the hospital, in the jungle. One can
understand that they were cutting up bodies...the smell and everything,
so they had made the place that far away outside the city. But
we had to carry these four corpses.
That was the first time I saw a brown bag open. The doctor was
the father of one of my friends so he allowed me in. He said,
"You can see how man looks inside," and he opened the
bodies. It was really shocking to see how man looks inside. And
this was only the body: later on I saw the postmortem of the mind
also. Compared to that it is nothing, this is only the poor body.
Your mind is so rich in crap....
That day one thing happened that I have to tell you, although
it is not concerned with what I was going to tell you - but it
must be concerned in some way, otherwise why should I remember
it?
When we were carrying out the bodies after they were postmortemed....
They put them together again and covered them. One of the leaders
of my town, Shri Nath Batt, had always felt as if I was his enemy,
for the simple reason that I was a friend of his son and he thought
I was corrupting him - and in a way he was right. By chance it
happened that we were carrying a corpse together; I was ahead,
holding both the poles at the front of the stretcher, and Shri
Nath Batt was behind me holding the end of the two poles.
The head of the man, the dead man, was at my end, and the legs
at his end. I had just read somewhere that when a man dies of
course he loses all control - control over the bladder also, so
if you put his head upwards and his legs downwards.... I thought,
"This is a good chance to see whether that idea is right
or wrong," so I just raised the poles.... And you should
have seen what happened - because that corpse pissed and Shri
Nath Batt ran away!
And we could not persuade him to come back. He said, "I
cannot. Have you ever heard of a dead man pissing? It is a ghost!"
I told him, "You are the leader."
He said, "To hell with the leader! I don't want to be the
leader if this is the kind of work I have to do. And I've always
known you - from the very beginning. Why did you raise those poles?"
I said, "I don't know, it must have been the ghost. I suddenly
felt like somebody was raising my hands up; I am not at all responsible."
I had to drag that body alone, for two furlongs, to the hospital.
Shri Nath Batt was in the town telling everybody, "This boy
is going to kill somebody someday. Today just by God's grace I
am saved. That ghost just pissed over me, on my clothes. And that
boy persuaded me: `You have to come because you are the leader;
otherwise what will people think? - a leader in times of need,
missing. Then remember, at voting time I will not be of any help.'
So I went there, but I never thought that he would do such a thing
to me." dark03
It has always been a problem.... In my whole life I have
not been able to vote, for the simple reason that whenever the
officers reached me to fill in the form so that I could be a valid
voter, there was a clause, "What is your religion?"
I said, "I don't have any religion. I am a religious person."
They said, "But all the clauses have to be filled in."
I said, "Then you can take your form back. I am not so much
interested in voting anyway, because it is an unnecessary anxiety
when you have to choose between two idiots. Whom to vote for? - whoever
you vote for, you are voting for an idiot. It is better not to
vote, at least your hands are clean. You can see: my hands are
absolutely clean!" rebel10
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